Things that people don't comparison shop for online.

I tend to think that people comparison shop items for online tend to do so for items that are expensive and easily identified products. I don't think soft goods or good that have a high emotional commitment easily lend themselves to comparison shopping. When a item has a high emotional value, there tends to be an emotional commitment to buying that changes the buying process. When a user is buying based on physical criteria, (ie performance) comparison shopping is the ideal mechanism. Despite the attempts of a number of vendors to convey a more emotional shopping experience, without out the tactile experience of buying, I think these attempts are doomed.

Using Ebay in a comparison shopping engine

I am one of the very few shopping comparison engines (besides mytriggers.com) which regularly uses Ebay search results. Some people aren't big fans of auctions in comparison engines. I think they have a place and have tried to find that place in my site. For me I deliberately limit the results to Buy It Now results. These results are from vendors that have a Buy it Now price on the item. In other words the price you see at Earlymiser is the price you pay. One thing I dislike about Mytriggers approach to using ebay which lists all the current bids for an item. When you set a trigger at mytriggers - your trigger is activated when the item falls into the price range on the current bid. In other words mytrigger is effectively sending a false buying signal that you can buy the item at that price when all you can actually do is put in a bid. That's why I stay away from auctions without a Buy it Now price. If you wanted to participate in an auction for an item, you would just go to a eBay and participate in an auction. The Buy It Now price represents a real price on an item. This is the first time I have used the Ebay web service program. It takes a little getting used to but frankly it's a very robust API. I need to do the final steps in developer certification (I am self certified right now ~ 10,000 queries a day which even with JPCache on the front end I regularly hit the limit late at night 11:00 PM or so). Remarkably we are having a great deal of success with the eBay program as well. It seems to bring back some great results in some things I wouldn't have guessed such categories as eye makeup

Continued Development on earlymiser.com

With the recent 60 GB PS3 giveawat I found myself too busy with the actual promotion to actually do anything on the site for January. That's gonna change in February as I am going to get back to working on the site. So look for additional content and additional features in Feb/March. If you have any requested features for earlymiser.com, set up a forum account and post. Due to the high volume of spam postings, I am currently approving all new forum members. So if you join the forum and I haven't approved you - send me an email (brian (at) earlymiser.net).